Fated in Stone, page 24
He nodded. “What’s wrong?”
“Ben Logan? You’re Ben Logan? Logan is your last name?”
“Benjamin Logan. Yes.” He frowned. “I didn’t tell you my full name yet?”
She shook her head.
“You did a bonding ritual with me and didn’t even know my last name?” he murmured almost to himself.
“I didn’t know your first name when your wolf leapt through me the first time, making the ending of the bonding ritual necessary.”
He flinched. “I thought I told you my last name at some point… So much has happened, I just didn’t think…” He raised his brows. “I don’t know yours either.”
“Barker. Elle Barker. That’s my mother’s name.” She shook her head. “Logan.” She still couldn’t quite make the puzzle pieces fit. “These Logans?” She gestured at the TV. “The billionaire philanthropist family of import-exporters?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“So. You’re a billionaire?” And she’d taken him into a bait stop for clothes. A billionaire. Wearing bait shop clothes. Her brain couldn’t even make those two things fit together.
“The Family doesn’t have to worry about money.” He shrugged. “Gives us the resources we need to do our work and stay hidden. Keep the existence of monsters hidden.” He glanced at her. “Does the money bother you?”
“Well.” Billionaire. It was an amount of money and resources she could scarcely wrap her head around. “I would typically be one of the ‘eat the rich’ crowd.”
His eyes darkened as he met her gaze. “What if it’s ‘the rich eat you’ instead?”
“That depends. If that’s innuendo, then that’s okay.” And didn’t her body respond immediately to the idea. “But since you have a wolf that leaps out every so often, that could also be taken literally, and that’s less okay.”
His mouth ticked up at one corner. She couldn’t tell if that was a smile or a wince.
“Innuendo,” he said, his voice quiet, and deeper now.
“Then that’s okay, then.”
Her heartbeat started to pound again, and all those lusty feelings that had been plaguing her throughout the morning came roaring back with a vengeance at the look in his eyes. He raised a brow and the little tick at the corner of his mouth turned into an actual smile. A smile that looked distinctly…wolfish.
She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger at him. “That’s not an invitation. We have to get on the road. I’m not giving you permission to eat me.” Yet. And the fact that she thought that “yet” was embarrassing.
His smile grew. “Did you just think ‘yet’?”
“No.” She winced. “Maybe.”
His low chuckle danced along her skin, sending little electrical sparks down her spine and right to her pussy. She tried hard not to imagine in detail what it would be like having Ben eat her. An effort she failed at miserably. Especially since it was the very image that had sent her over the edge in her shower orgasm. Now that he’d mentioned it, it was all she could think about again.
The fact that he was thinking about it in that moment just made things worse. And that “yet” seemed a more significant disclaimer than it had been just a minute ago.
She scowled. “How did you know?”
He tapped his nose. “Excellent sense of smell, remember. And you smell…delicious right now.”
Well. She wasn’t sure which was worse, the blush making her face so hot, or the way her thighs just wobbled with the need to wrap herself around him. Both. Both things were bad.
But especially the fact that she so desperately wanted to wrap herself around him. Without delay. And they had a long drive ahead of them and a lot of things to do and survive before she could do that.
There was no if in her thoughts. It was only a matter of when. When she could get her legs wrapped around his head. When she could ride his tongue. When she finally gave in to the lust that was such a hot spike of want in her blood she could barely see straight.
She took a step toward him, without thinking, and then stopped herself. If she so much as brushed against him in that moment, they’d never get out of this motel room. And they had to get out of this motel room. They were already two days behind the professor and his kidnappers. Since the kidnappers had stopped moving, she and Ben had to take advantage of that. They didn’t have an extra few hours to fuck.
And frankly, she didn’t want to fuck him in a rush. She wanted to strip him and take her time exploring him. They just didn’t have that kind of time.
She swallowed hard and took a deliberate step back, but her voice was rough and breathy when she said, “We’d better go.”
Ben’s eyes were so dark now, they were nearly black. His nostrils flared and she knew he could scent every little bit of her desire. Which probably wasn’t helping their situation.
He didn’t move as she threw her toiletries into her bag. Stood so still in fact she could almost think he’d turned to his stone statue. She’d have hunted the room for his wolf if he didn’t murmur, “Ready?” with his back still to her as she zipped up her duffle bag.
She glanced one last time at the TV. Nothing that resembled a suspicious monster sighting, that she could see. “Ready.” She tossed her bag up over her shoulder and proceeded him out of the room. But she walked on wobbly legs, knowing he was right behind her, practically feeling the heat of him along her spine.
This was going to be a very long day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
She was killing him. Slowly. Steadily. Killing him.
Ben took his turn at the wheel because focusing on the road kept him from thinking about just how much he wanted to get inside Elle. Her scent had been driving him slowly mad all morning. Even before he’d knocked on her door and asked about breakfast, her scent had carried from her room into his, weaving around him, invading his dreams. He woke hard and aching and reached for her before he realized she wasn’t in the bed beside him.
Which hadn’t left him in the best of moods. He’d left to get breakfast to clear his head and try to regain some of his control. The instant he was back in the room with her, though, all that effort went out the window. The only thing that kept him from tumbling her back onto the bed that morning was the equally strong desire to make sure she ate enough. To make sure she didn’t suffer after being forced into the ritual. And if he were being honest with himself, he liked feeding her, making sure she was looked after. He wanted to have the right to look after her. For the rest of their lives.
But she still had to be the one to make that choice.
At least, he hoped she still had the choice.
And that uncertainty was the other thing that kept him from making a reality of all the lusty things he wanted to do to her. The lingering fear that he’d fucked up their future already. He didn’t want to do anything that made that worse.
But not kissing her this morning, not rolling her onto her back and burying his cock deep inside her, had taken more restraint and will than he thought he had.
“We need to talk about something,” he said. “Anything that’s…not sexy. Or I’m going to crash the car.”
The spike of desire in her scent did not help his state of mind.
She swallowed audibly and squeaked, “What?”
He glanced at her, but dragged his gaze back to the road as quickly as he’d looked away, because looking at her made things worse and he really would crash the car if he did that. “You’ve smelled like dessert all morning, and I’m having a hard time concentrating because of it. If I’m driving, I need to concentrate. If you’re driving, I need to let you concentrate. All these things require we find a way to get all that delicious lust out of your scent—at least for now—so we need to talk about something that’s…distracting.”
His little speech left her quiet for a long moment. He didn’t look at her again, but his hands flexed on the steering wheel. Her scent had an added note of surprise to it, and he’d swear she was nodding, but he’d have to look directly at her to be sure because the movement was subtle. He kept his gaze on the passing traffic—lot of big rigs this time of day, so he had to focus—and the trees bracketing the highway on either side. It wasn’t a huge highway, only two lanes in each direction, which made concentrating around the big trucks even more important.
“Monsters,” she finally said, though she still squeaked a little, and that deliciously spicy scent of her lust was still perfuming the air.
If he asked her what she was really thinking about, and she actually told him, he was pretty sure he’d drive the car into a tree.
“Monsters,” he said. “Right. What about them?”
“Just…they’re pretty gross and disgusting and will hopefully be…distracting. Let’s talk about monsters. How about what we saw outside that town. The little things popping out of the dead monster’s goo. That’s new, right. That’s pretty gross.”
“New. Dangerous.” When he’d gone out for breakfast and a run to the drugstore, he’d called Eric to see how the sweep of the house and the area around it had gone. No signs of living monsters, but they’d been able to dig more into the remains of the professor’s lab and what had been inside all those boxes. “The black goo that was in the boxes at the house? My Family got some samples of that and sent them to my sister Judith. She’s the resident biologist. She’s going to work on analyzing what the stuff is and what it can do.”
“You have a sister who’s a biologist?”
“A few of us have work beyond just hunting and destroying monsters.”
“Like how you’re a blacksmith?”
“Mine is driven by a magic I was born with. I don’t have much choice but don’t mind that because I like metallurgy and working with weapons. Judith’s choice to study biology and genetics was just something she wanted to do. And it’s proven really helpful in our work. There’s usually a few scientists in each Family that do this kind of study.”
“You obviously know a lot about monsters. You keep…records?”
“Complete records on every named and known monster. Vulnerabilities and dangers and reproductive capabilities.”
“Diet?”
“They all eat anything they can get, but are specifically designed to crave eating humans.”
“Eew.”
“We need to talk about something distracting and gross.”
“That’s working.”
It was. Her scent was no longer quite so overwhelmingly filled with lust and that helped both of them. “Ne hates humans. He wants to see them destroyed.”
“The Elemental you mentioned, the one that sided with the monsters, that one was a water element, right?”
“It was.”
“So…does that mean every time it rains, we could be in danger?”
“Potentially, yes. But the one we know for sure that was working with my cousin has been dissipated. It’ll be unable to coalesce into something that can endanger us for years.”
“But there could be more? It’s still possible every rainstorm and puddle could be deadly?”
He relented. “It’s possible.”
“Any other Elementals involved besides water?”
“Not that have made themselves known to us.”
“How do you fight a Water Elemental?”
“I make special weapons. Fire daggers, and recently I’ve started making arrowheads with the same fire magic. Takes skill and my brand of magic to create them. I make weapons suited to dissipating all Elementals, but I’ve only ever kept a few on hand. Until a year and half ago, when the Water made itself known. Since then, I’ve made…a lot more. And we’ve been spreading them around to all our Family.”
“Your bag full of weapons?”
“Includes some of everything I might need. Including four fire daggers and a quiver of fire arrows.”
“Fire for Water, right. What else? How do they work?”
“Fire weapons need to be stabbed into a Water’s head area to dissipate them for centuries. Anywhere else, they’ll still dissipate but not for as long. Usually the length of a human lifetime, though, which is helpful for humans.”
She huffed out a chuckle.
“Air requires a sort of suction dagger called an aefier. Strike it into an Air Elemental anywhere and it pulls at their base element, then blows it apart so the entity is dissipated. Again, the closer you get to the head, the longer they’ll stay fragmented.”
“Useful. Lot of needing to get at things heads in all this. Monsters killed by chopping off their heads. Elementals dissipated by stabbing them in the head.”
He shrugged, then nodded.
“Useful to bear in mind in this world,” she said dryly. “What about Fire and Earth Elementals?”
“Molten daggers for Earth will loosen their hold on coherence, basically melting them.”
“You turn them into lava?”
“It sinks into the ground fast enough not to be dangerous,” he said, almost defensively.
“Sure sure. Cause lava is good that way. What works on Fire? A water dagger?”
“Yup.”
“That’s…a little on the nose.”
“Like a fire dagger wasn’t? We’ve been making these weapons for millennia. They need names that translate and can carry through centuries of changing language. We try to keep it basic. Aefier is the only one that doesn’t translate well so we just stick with that word.”
He could swear her mouth twitched into a smile, but since he was trying not to look at her directly, he couldn’t be sure.
“What does a water dagger do?”
“Same as the others, stabbed into a Fire, it’ll turn them to smoke and dissipate them for a time dependent on where they were stabbed.”
“Lot of stabbing going on here, too,” she commented.
“I can work with guns and other kinds of weaponry, but my preferences are swords and daggers and arrowheads. It’s where my magic leans. Most blacksmiths born to the Families are similar.”
“Arrowheads? You said you had a quiver with you. Why not make all the weapons as arrows. So you don’t have to get too close to an Elemental?”
“You’d have to be a good shot, though. Getting a solid hit on an Elemental is difficult at the best of times. Miss a shot, and you’re not likely to get a second. Most of our hunters find swords and daggers easier. Though some have specialized in archery over the centuries so that’s why we still make the arrowheads.”
“I’m an excellent shot with a bow and arrow,” she said, quietly, “but don’t have a clue how to use a sword or dagger—in this context. I can clean a fish or skin a rabbit well enough. I even learned how to fletch. A friend of my father’s taught me. My dad could do it, but not as well as his friend. So he made sure I learned from Deke. Deke was old and nice for a militia man. So we spent a lot of time fletching. I liked it better even than learning to reload ammunition. Felt more comfortable with the arrows than the guns.”
The insight into her youth, and what had to have been a scary period of time, left him hungry for more. “Can you still use bow and arrow? Have you kept that up?”
“I like it, so yes.” A quiet pause. Then, “I’ve kept up most of the skills my father had me learn. I’m not sure why.”
The hesitance in her voice made him want to pull her close and comfort her, and he wasn’t entirely certain why. But knowing she could defend herself, if it became necessary, was something of a relief. He wouldn’t always be around to protect her, even if he wanted to. Her having skills with various weapons would help her survive his world. An unintended benefit to her difficult youth.
He flicked a glance at her. Then said, “Because of your relationship to me, you’re more vulnerable to the monsters who understand what Nam-tar are. They could come after you to get to me.”
“Well that sucks.”
He couldn’t agree more. “But now that we’ve done the ritual, you’re less vulnerable. Stronger and can heal faster. And knowing you can use some of our weapons… That’ll be useful in this world. Even though you shouldn’t have to face monsters very often. That’s my job, not yours.”
She let out a long breath. “I prefer tracking.”
She had so many skills that were useful in his world, thanks to her upbringing and her own innate talent. He wasn’t sure he’d met a Nam-tar more suited to coming into their world. And yet, she didn’t want to use those skills to hunt monsters. He couldn’t blame her. She had only just learned all these things existed. Accepting a centuries-long duty to destroy Ne’s creatures wasn’t something that could happen overnight.
Besides that, though, Ben didn’t want her to do anything she didn’t want to do. If she wanted to sit around a large house doing nothing at all, he’d happily make that possible for her. He wanted her content, safe, and satisfied with her life more than he wanted anything else in the world.
Thinking about satisfying her led him back down the dangerous thought road, though, so he cleared his throat and said, “You’re free to do whatever you like. If you stay—” and wow, did that “if” hurt to say, “—you’ll be able to make all those decisions.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’m… It’s important to me that I’m free to decide what I do and when I do it.”
“Because of what happened to you as a child,” he said. Didn’t ask. The answer was obvious. “I won’t ever try to take that away from you. I promise.”
She nodded, and glanced out the window, falling silent for a few minutes.
While he didn’t want to bring this up, he had to remind her, “That monster, the grinluk, will think you’re a Family member with a weird ability to split your entities. The grinluk thought you were one of us and yet different. They’ll see that as dangerous. It makes you more vulnerable when we catch up to them. Even without knowing you’re my Nam-tar, the grinluk will want to destroy you. Or…capture and use you.”
He caught her shiver from the corner of his eyes.
“Either way,” he said, “it’s important you know so you can be careful.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
After a moment, he said, quietly, “Well that was distracting.”
